Working through my life's nightmare

This is not a metaphor

I’ve thought about and started a lot of different posts in the last 2 weeks and haven’t finished any of them. I haven’t felt able to clearly express what’s in my head and haven’t had to the time to work on polishing something that wasn’t finished or ‘right’.

So all I’m going to write about is this today. I want to capture a moment I experienced this afternoon. Adelaide’s had some wild and woolly weather this winter and I left the house in the rain this morning but after a sunny lunch with some wonderful new colleagues I began the drive home into a southerly change. The sun is shining again now but in between I drove into a huge storm.

It’d been building for 10 minutes into the drive and all the car’s windows were dripping as the wipers were having trouble clearing the windows even on their highest speed. The constant drops on the rear window combined with the spray on the road made it hard to see cars behind me and in front of me, the grey skies and shiny water were making all the lights and reflections blur into one. And then the rain went horizontal. I was driving into the rain as it fell in heavy sheets and the wind drove it towards my car. The wipers made absolutely no difference to the water on the windscreen and every car nearby slowed down experiencing the same thing. It felt like I was no longer driving through the rain, the rain was driving over us. But the strangest thing happened as the rain blurred the front window, it washed all the drops off the back windows and I could see clearly out of all of them. Not entirely useful when you’re driving a car but I could see clearly the storm behind me, the dark skies and other cars perfectly. And then the rain blew itself out and I drove into a lighter patch of storm and I could see the sky and then sunshine! The car was washed as if with a power hose and I was free, looking at the blue sky ahead and the storm behind.

As I said, this is not a metaphor, but just a small moment in time where something outside my control happened, I experienced it and then it moved on and I was back on my journey.

ps. I’m not entirely happy that this post has expressed what was on my mind but I’m going to post it anyway. 50% of nothing is still nothing!